After the apocalypse, tenants go Lord of the Flies

Tenants of a New York high-rise apartment escape a nuclear attack by hiding out in the building's bunkerlike basement while being hunted by biohazard baddies.

Tenants of a New York high-rise apartment escape a nuclear attack...

Never, ever get sealed in a basement for any length of time with members of the human race, even with a nuclear holocaust proceeding outside. This is the most important lesson I learned from The Divide, a dismal film with arty ambitions that rapidly decays into idiocy and ugly cliché.

Describing this will require spoilers later on, but for now: Imagine a grown-up Lord of the Flies, re-set in the dirty bowels of a Manhattan apartment building, in which the brutalized Piggy gets played by Rosanna Arquette. Society breaks down. Cruelty escalates. Everyone who can get debased does get debased, less for the torture-porn thrill of it than to make a Really Big Point about the overall flimsiness of common moral strictures.

Directed by Xavier Gens (Hitman) from a screenplay by Karl Mueller and Eron Sheean, The Divide opens on a mad crush of apartment denizens chasing down a stairwell to escape the apocalypse. A bunch of them land in the cellar, where Mickey (Michael Biehn), the crabby, misanthropic super, locks them inside and tapes up the door to protect them all from radioactive dust. (That's some amazing duct tape ya got there, Mickey.)

"You wanna survive, you listen to me," he says, but that doesn't last long. No one likes Mickey - not the hot-tempered Josh (Milo Ventimiglia), not the cynical Bobby (Michael Eklund), not the imperturbable Eva (Lauren German) or her wussy French fiance, Sam (Iván González). The pro forma stalwart played by Courtney B. Vance doesn't much like him, either. (This is a horror movie. He's black. Guess what happens.) As Marilyn, a traumatized mom whose daughter, Wendy, gets hauled away by enigmatic bad guys in biohazard suits, Arquette retreats into a shell of crazy-chick eccentricities that guarantee her degradation later on.

Commence spoiler alerts here.

Spoiler one: rape. Repeated and brutal, beginning with Marilyn. Spoiler two: dismemberment. Josh hacks off Mickey's index finger in glorious close-up. Spoiler three: plot holes. The biohazard baddies are never explained, although they seem to be American, and they seem to be running a lab where they depilate their subjects and hold them in suspended animation with their eyes sealed shut. Josh finds Wendy in just such a state of zonked-out hairlessness. This is never explained. The need for baldness is never explained, either, although Josh and Bobby do shave their heads later on, and Bobby declares, "It's in the hair," at what passes for a critical juncture.

Speaking of junctures, the title may or may not refer to the divide between basement and building, civilization and jungle, predators and prey. Or it may be a reference to No Exit, Jean-Paul Sartre's classic existentialist primer on the torment of human company. The play may argue that hell is other people, but that's inaccurate. Hell, my friends, is movies like this.

More Information

The Divide

Rated (no rating): brutal and graphic violence and sex, and lots of profanity

Running time: 122 minutes

Now showing: at midnight Friday and Saturday at the River Oaks Theatre